


Just Another Hogwarts AU

by eluna



Series: Subvert All The Tropes [6]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Anxious Dean Winchester, Canon Compliant, Case Fic, Characters React to Fandom, Closet Nerd Dean Winchester, Codependent Winchesters (Supernatural), Crack Treated Seriously, De-Aged Dean Winchester, De-Aged Sam Winchester, Dean and Sam Winchester Go to Hogwarts, Demon Blood Addict Sam Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Dean Winchester, Emotionally Repressed Dean Winchester, Fandom Allusions & Cliches & References, Hurt No Comfort, In-Universe Supernatural Novels, M/M, Meta, Nerd Sam Winchester, Non-Penetrative Sex, POV Dean Winchester, Post-Episode: s04e18 The Monster at the End of This Book, Pre-Episode: s04e20 The Rapture, Season/Series 04, Self-Absorbed Dean Winchester, Trope Subversion, Unreliable Narrator, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Virtual Reality, first time in a long time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 18:24:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14753975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: If he’s not mistaken—and oh, Dean hopes he’s mistaken—he’s found himself in what appears to be a fucking Hogwarts dormitory. His four-poster bed’s the only one in the room, which doesn’t match up with his dim memory of the first couple Harry Potter movies, but the canary-yellow bedding, bed curtains, and window hangings all unmistakably match the large Hufflepuff tapestry adorning the opposite wall, and amidst the clutter scattered across the wooden desk under one of the windows are a matching necktie (yellow and black), a battered library book stamped Quidditch Through the Ages in faded gold lettering, and—shit—a wand. Staggering across the plush carpet to the desk, Dean warily picks the thing up and is rewarded with a smattering of coppery sparks that fizzle out in midair.Fucking hell.----Case fic, canon compliant.





	Just Another Hogwarts AU

**Author's Note:**

> This fic took a year and a half to write and then spent another half a year languishing on my hard drive before I decided to fuck it and finally publish the thing. I'm not entirely happy with the middle, but I clearly don't have the motivation to make the revisions I was meaning to. Maybe someday. :)
> 
> Thanks so much to **publia** for her eternal hand-holding and support. Heed the tags, hold on tight, and enjoy.

The thing is, you’d think shit like this would go down during a case—that this bullshit, when it happens, would happen on a hunt because they’d inadvertently provoked the monster responsible—but it’s on Dean’s day off that he dozes off riding shotgun in the Impala and wakes up in… well, to be honest, he’s not sure where he is when he wakes up. He’d only been halfway out of it, lazily following the jagged leaps from scene to scene within his imagination as his baby’s thrum in his ears and against his sprawl across the bench lulled him into a stupor, when the loss of the dull roar, gentle vibrations, and solid heat radiating from Sam beside him jolts Dean fully awake. He feels the differences before he sees them: his limbs settle awkwardly against a stiff, wooden headboard even as his butt and thighs sink into what’s got to be the softest mattress he’s used in years (decades, lifetimes); thick layers of padded warmth cover his lap. Opening his eyes, Dean only lasts a second before he scrambles out of bed with a curse.

If he’s not mistaken—and _oh_ , Dean hopes he’s mistaken—he’s found himself in what appears to be a _fucking_ Hogwarts dormitory. His four-poster bed’s the only one in the room, which doesn’t match up with his dim memory of the first couple _Harry Potter_ movies, but the canary-yellow bedding, bed curtains, and window hangings all unmistakably match the large Hufflepuff tapestry adorning the opposite wall, and amidst the clutter scattered across the wooden desk under one of the windows are a matching necktie (yellow and black), a battered library book stamped _Quidditch Through the Ages_ in faded gold lettering, and— _shit_ —a wand. Staggering across the plush carpet to the desk, Dean warily picks the thing up and is rewarded with a smattering of coppery sparks that fizzle out in midair.

Fucking hell.

Fucking _witches_ , _literally_ , Dean realizes next, and it’s with a painful rush that he also realizes he’s got no idea how to get in contact with Sam.

He instinctively goes to fish his phone out of his pocket, but Dean’s jeans and leather are gone; he’s decked out instead in a humiliating two-piece set of pajamas patterned, by the looks of it, with the red, gold, and black balls used to play Quidditch. His hands feel a little too soft as he rubs them anxiously over his thighs—he may have lost his lifetime’s buildup of calluses when that angel freak pulled him topside, but the sensitivity of his palms against the cotton feels foreign, and Dean raises them in front of his face to examine them. His hands look—not just smoother, but smaller—younger?

Absently brushing a hand down his face, he scans the room again until his gaze falls on a floor-length mirror hung from the door. Approaching it, Dean shivers and then curses as he sneers at his reflection: judging by the soft curves of his profile and the absence of any lines around his eyes, his meatsuit’s been aged down to about seventeen, maybe eighteen, and he’d be willing to bet that he’s lost a few corresponding inches in height as well. “Shit,” he mutters, dumbstruck, and with one last glare at the loathsome smattering of freckles on his cheeks, Dean turns away, his eyes falling on the ornate trunk sitting at the foot of his bed.

The damn thing doesn’t have any remotely normal clothes in it, but that’s just as well: he’s probably best off trying to blend in with these people until he can find Sammy and figure out what the hell is going on. It occurs to him ten minutes later, while he’s doing up the yellow tie and tucking it into his _fucking_ wizard’s robe, that Sam may not have gotten zapped here when Dean did—that he might be on his own in this one—and he shoves down his ensuing panic with a hard swallow. He’s reaching for the wand again to stow it in his pocket when he notices the glinting metal badges lying next to it, and he picks them up and studies them for a moment.

Looks like he’s Hufflepuff Quidditch Captain as well as Head Boy. Dean wonders how touched in the head whoever made _that_ decision must have been as, shrugging, he pins them both to the front of his robes.

His dormitory door opens up into a living space that’s way too small, with way too little seating, to be the Hufflepuff common room. Besides, the color scheme is all wrong: the loveseat and couple of armchairs by the hearth are patterned red and yellow, distinctly reminding Dean of McDonald’s, with black velvet drapes and gold-flaked finishes on all of the surfaces. Another Hufflepuff banner hangs on this side of his own dormitory door, while a deep scarlet Gryffindor one adorns a second door, and a third door along the adjacent wall is unfurnished.

He exits through the plain one, feeling like a dumbass with his wizard getup and this freaking wand, which he stashes in the messenger bag he’d also brought from the dormitory. The thing’s no use to him, anyway: maybe Dean’s got freaky magic powers now, who knows, but it’s not like he knows how to cast any spells. When Sammy was at Stanford and Dad had made it clear that he wasn’t coming back for Dean between jobs anymore, Dean watched the first three _Harry Potter_ films in theatres—used to waste whole summer days in the cool of the movies, play audiobooks on the drives from hunt to hunt—he shoves down the memory with a snort. Anyway, it was a long damn time ago, especially with all the Hell years intervening, and he doesn’t remember much besides that it’s Levi- _o_ -sa, not Levio- _sa_.

Dean guesses that he’s at the top of some tower because the door opens out at the top of a tight spiral staircase, but once he reaches the base of those stairs, he’s got no clue where he is in the castle or where he’s supposed to go next. He wracks his memory for a moment: the Great Hall seems like a safe enough bet, and to get there, he’s just got to find his way to the first floor, right? Easy peasy.

Of course, Dean didn’t bank on any of the goddamn moving staircases, or walls only pretending to be doors, or doors only pretending to be walls, and he _still_ hasn’t found the Great Hall twenty minutes later when he gets his left foot caught in—is that a trick step? Grunting, Dean tries to jerk his foot upward only for it to sink another couple inches into the step. “Son of a bitch,” he hisses, and it’s another five minutes before help arrives in the form of a familiar-looking brunette chewing on her lower lip and dressed in a red and gold tie and stockings.

“You’re Kristen fucking Stewart,” he half-says, half-asks, and then breaks down into a wheeze of laughter.

Narrowing her eyes at him, she says, “Um, no, it’s Bella? Bella Swan? We’ve been in the same Herbology class for the last seven years?”

Dean just laughs harder, sinking all the way to his knee into the step, even as he accepts her hand and lets her yank fruitlessly for a few seconds before she manages to drag him out of the trick step. He’s trapped in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry with the chick from the _Twilight_ series—the _actual_ chick, not just the actress who played her in the movies—and somehow _she’s_ the Gryffindor and _he’s_ the Hufflepuff in this situation.

“Right, yeah, Bella. Um, sorry. Thanks for…”

Bella raises her eyebrows at him. “It’s usually only the first years who get caught in the trick steps.”

“Clearly I haven’t had my coffee yet,” Dean quips, earning him another incredulous look. That’s right: don’t Hogwarts students all have some kind of unnatural fixation with pumpkin juice or something? His bad. “Heading to breakfast?”

“Yeah,” Bella says, expression clearing. “Come on, I’ll walk down with you.”

Bella Swan turns out to be a terrible conversationalist, prattling on about her Hogsmeade date last week with her boyfriend, Jacob, and wondering whether there’ll be waffles at breakfast, but at least she seems to know her way to the Great Hall and leads them there without further incident. Dean gives himself a moment to take in the invisible ceiling that opens up into a vivid image of a cloudy morning sky, then to take stock of the professors seated at the table up front: he recognizes Hagrid and McGonagall and Dumbledore (who Dean notes with satisfaction looks like Richard Harris and not that asshole from _Prisoner of Azkaban_ ), but he thinks the tired-looking man with the patched robes is the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor from movie three, which puts the timeline of this universe down as…?

“Hey, Bella, what year is it?” he asks, scanning the High Table for Snape and coming up short.

“2009,” she answers slowly, and Dean may not know the exact years the _Potter_ series is supposed to take place in, but Dean just came from 2009 before this insane shit went down, and _that_ definitely doesn’t match up with the setting of any of the books. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay, Dean?”

“Yeah, just freakin’ peachy,” mumbles Dean, and he blinks as a figure rises from what must be the Slytherin table and makes its way toward them. Sammy.

Only Sam’s been aged down, too, and Dean can’t believe it didn’t occur to him before now that, if he himself is in the body of a seventh year, Sammy’s going to look the same as he did when he was about thirteen years old, and right away that fucks Dean up hard. It hurts to see Sam from before Ruby, before Stanford or Flagstaff—a version of his brother that’s never left Dean behind before, Sam who used to idolize his big brother, grin blindingly at him with candy-pink lips and cuddle up to Dean in their sleep, baby-smooth chub smothering him from all angles. The ache swallows Dean up, and he’s suddenly more desperate than he’s felt in a while to swallow _Sam_ up, just somehow engulf the kid whole so he’ll never have to be without him, ever again.

This is usually the point in Dean’s emotional trajectory at which he goes looking for orgasms, sometimes from Sam but more often not. It’s easier to feel this way when there’s an afterglow to help him forget that Sam will always be too far away to bear.

“Dean,” Sammy’s saying urgently, and he tunes back into the here and now, “we need to go somewhere and talk _right_ now.”

“Sex first, talk second,” Dean mutters, whirling around and racing out of the Great Hall with a bemused Sam on his heels.

“Dean, _what_ —?”

But Dean doesn’t listen, just rounds the corner and starts testing doors until one of them opens for him. Broom cupboard. Excellent. He starts laughing again, uncontrollably.

Sam’s still fighting it, insisting, “We have more important things to be doing than having sex, Dean, and I thought—I thought…”

“Hmm?” Dean hums at him as he spins Sammy around and into the closet and closes the door, plunging them into near-darkness. He drops his bag, hovers over Sam, weathers the heady rush it gives him to be bigger than Sam again.

“Thought we weren’t doing this anymore,” Sammy finishes breathlessly, his voice puberty-high and cracking.

Dean takes a steadying breath and braces his arms on the wall behind Sam, elbows resting on either side of Sammy’s head. “Do you not want to?”

“No, I—I mean, it’s not that I don’t want—you said it was sick, Dean, I thought _you_ thought we were sick for ever doing this.”

Dean remembers that: awkwardly fielding the slash shippers from those damn _Supernatural_ books, the blow to his stomach as Sam danced nervously around the subject. “I thought that’s what you’d want me to say. Ever since you found out about my demon deal…”

“Screw the deal,” says Sammy, closing his eyes.

Dean’s breath stutters out brokenly. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sam confirms, and he curls one leg around the back of Dean’s and strains his neck forward and up for a kiss.

It’s familiar but not, because the first time they did this wasn’t until after Flagstaff; Dean’s never kissed Sam when they were _this_ young, not unless you count the little good-night and good-morning pecks Sam used to give him when Dad was out hunting. Sam’s all elbows and knees like this, baby fat barely giving way to a hint of the muscle Sam’s eventually meant to build, and it twists Dean up inside to have his baby Sammy pressed up against him this way—but Dean’s used to tamping down shouts from his conscience, got real good at it under Alastair’s tutelage, and reminds himself that Sam’s got the maturity of a twenty-something-year-old underneath all that butter-soft skin.

It doesn’t take long for the grind of Sammy’s hand along their dicks to escalate into orgasms: it’s been years for Sam and decades for Dean, and they’ve got teenage-boy stamina to boot to contend with, Sam especially. Still, it’s Dean who comes first, bucking violently into Sam’s grip, and he cries out with sensitivity as Sam keeps fisting them both until his own orgasm hits a few minutes later. “Pushy bitch,” Dean mutters fondly into Sam’s hair as his baby brother’s voice cracks and wails, and he gathers his Sammy contentedly up into his arms.

“Wanted this so much when you came back to me,” Sammy says finally, his legs still shaking as Dean holds him up, nuzzling into Dean’s neck with little mashes of his lips and nose.

“Yeah,” Dean sighs, but he doesn’t get into it. It was the Hell memories stopping him at first, and then he found out about Sam using his freaky powers, _lying_ about his powers, _screwing_ _Ruby_ , and Dean can’t have that fight again right now, clings to his whole world tucked inside this one little body and tells himself that they’re going to be different when they get back home, Sam will be different and will stay for him. It’s a goddamn lie, but that’s fine, even better if they don’t talk about it.

Sammy reaches up to rub at Dean’s cheeks, and it’s not until then that Dean realizes he must be crying a little, because the slip-slide of Sam’s fingers over his cheekbones is slick with moisture. “I love you,” he tells Dean now, and Dean would crawl inside Sam’s chest, curl up around his ribcage, and die there, if he could.

Shit starts getting a little too real for Dean’s tastes then, and he gently turns his face to the side. Sammy heaves a sigh, but loops pliant arms carefully around Dean’s waist, kisses his chest once.

“So,” says Dean after he’s taken a minute to compose himself. “Hogwarts.”

“Hogwarts,” Sam echoes, still a little quieter than his usual voice.

“Trickster god?” Dean keeps one arm around Sammy as he slides to sit on the dusty wooden planks below their feet, and Sam goes with him and doesn’t ask questions when Dean cradles Sammy tightly against his chest, burrows his face into the kid’s stupid, floppy hair.

Sam shakes his head, his cheek rubbing snugly against one of Dean’s pecs. His hair tickles Dean’s nose, smells good. “I don’t know. I don’t _think_ so. He promised he’d leave us alone after you—after he brought you back—and what reason would he or any other Trickster have for plunging us into Hogwarts, of all places? The prank wouldn’t be—relevant; there’s no lesson here. He wouldn’t do something this intrusive without some ironic reason for it.”

“Yeah, well, we haven’t been here for that long yet. Let’s keep an eye out to see if some kind of moral message or—or plotline crops up,” Dean says, and Sam nods.

“Can’t be a djinn, either. If it were, we wouldn’t both have been pulled into the same dream—”

“And adventuring around Hogwarts may be geeky enough to be _your_ wish, but if a djinn put you under, I’d be a figment of the dream and wouldn’t be aware that something was off here.”

Sammy scowls at him. “Dude, my ideal Hogwarts definitely wouldn’t involve being in Slytherin with a bunch of characters from TV shows I don’t watch.”

“So it’s _all_ fictional characters?” Dean asks. “My little run-in with Bella this morning wasn’t a fluke?”

Sam frowns. “Bela? Bela Talbot? What would—”

“Not Bela Talbot; Bella Swan. Chick from the _Twilight_ series with no personality. Beats me how she got placed in Gryffindor when I’m in freakin’ Hufflepuff.”

A devilish smile playing at his lips, Sammy tilts up his chin to look Dean in the eyes. “I don’t know, man. I can see it.”

“It’s the pansy house!”

“It’s the house for hard work and loyalty,” Sam corrects cheerfully, “and you’re loyal to a fault, Dean. At least you’re not in _Slytherin_ —I’d take Hufflepuff over Slytherin any day.”

“‘I don’t know, man. I can see it,’” Dean taunts, and Sam rolls his eyes. “You’re ambitious, competitive. You sure as hell didn’t have a problem ditching your family to go to Stanford—”

Glaring, Sam interrupts, “Oh, not _this_ again. I wasn’t the one who insisted it had to be one or the other! In a healthy family with proper boundaries—”

“Boundaries. Right.”

Sammy softens, his face contorting into that stupid expression of pity that always makes Dean feel raw and open and ashamed. “I know you think I was leaving _you_ ,” he says slowly, “but it’s not… I’ve never been able to tell where I stop and you or Dad starts, Dean, and sometimes I don’t _want_ to, and that scares the hell out of me. It isn’t supposed to be this hard to be your own person.”

And Dean does know what Sammy means, sort of. When Sam and Dad were gone, he’d put on Dad’s music, in Dad’s car, wearing Dad’s leather jacket and haircut, and wonder where _Dean_ himself was buried under all of it—how different he’d have been if he’d had a stronger _self_ growing up, and what, if anything, his personhood was worth. Sometimes he’d strip away layers of Dad to see how he felt about what was underneath, but he pulled them back over himself like a shield every time Dad checked in, and for good when he went to get Sammy from school. Some things are easiest in the dark.

He dresses Sammy slowly, savoring the pliancy of Sam’s soft little limbs. “We should try to blend in—figure out what we’re dealing with and who might be responsible,” he says as he does up the green tie.

Sammy just stares at him for a few moments, mostly dazed, but with a hurt little crinkle softening his eyes. “Check your bag; there was a class timetable in mine,” he answers finally. “I’ll meet you at dinner to compare stories? Great Hall?”

“Only unless you’ve got cell phones somewhere that you’ve been holding out on me.”

Sam smiles weakly. “None of that stuff works on Hogwarts grounds. All the magic in the air makes the signals go haywire.”

“Nerd. Should’ve put you in Ravenclaw.”

“Maybe in another life,” Sam says, shrugging. Dean thinks back to his djinn fantasy—where Jessica never died and Dad never raised them under a crusade—and thinks maybe Sam wasn’t meant to be so strong-willed: maybe it’s one more consequence that losing Mom foisted upon them. He imagines it for a moment—Sam without the stubborn, rebellious streak—but the thought of Sam not being _his Sammy_ anymore makes Dean feel a little sick.

He struggles with Sam’s robe as Sam buttons Dean’s shirt, and five minutes later, they emerge from the broom cupboard with schedules in hand. Dean’s got Potions first, in the dungeon, but after he meanders to the basement floor, it takes him nearly half an hour to find the damn place. He and Sam split early enough that it looks like class is just getting started, and he ducks into a seat next to the only kid who hasn’t got a partner.

“What have _you_ been up to?” asks the kid, and Dean turns to find himself staring at a young Robert Downey, Jr., in a Ravenclaw uniform for a split second before he adds in a horrified hiss, eyes widening, “ _Ew_!”

“And you are?”

“Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, your Potions partner since sixth year, what’s gotten into you? He’s your brother, the one you’re always trying to protect, and he’s thirteen years old, that’s bloody _disgusting_!”

Dean just gapes at him for a second before his attention is drawn to the walrus-looking dude at the front of the room. “Where’s Snape?” he asks Sherlock out the side of his mouth.

“Who’s Snape?”

Dean drops it, asking instead, “Well, who’s this guy?”

“Who, Slughorn?” says Sherlock, narrowing his eyebrows at Dean.

“Slughorn?”

“Dean!” booms the professor apparently named Slughorn, eyes falling on the two of them.

Dean jumps a little, then fixes Slughorn with his slyest smile. “Professor.”

To his surprise, Slughorn just chortles a bit and says, “Now that we have everyone’s attention, we can move on to today’s lesson: Amortentia! On page one-eighty-three of your textbooks…”

Dean digs through his bag until he finds a book with the word _Potions_ on the spine, then gets distracted enough by the freaking moving pictures next to every recipe that he tunes out most of what Slughorn has to say. Thankfully, Sherlock turns out to be a bit of a control freak and takes point on the brewing, barking directions at Dean to help chop and stir as needed.

Like Bella Swan was before breakfast, Sherlock’s actually pretty dull to talk to, keeps chastising Dean that the recipe should be “elementary!” to him and muttering that _John_ is always a competent assistant. “John Watson?”

“My boyfriend,” Sherlock nods, and despite his earlier, mortifying deduction, he doesn’t seem to notice Dean’s arched eyebrow.

Sherlock and Bella aren’t the only people Dean meets (and god, does that feel weird to say) who behave like caricatures of themselves—even more one-dimensional than the characters on which they’re based. More than that: they’re all beyond inobservant, approaching visually and cognitively impaired. Throughout the rest of double Potions, only Dean seems to notice that no fewer than two of his Ravenclaw classmates look exactly like Robert Downey, Jr., but when Dean tries to point out Sherlock’s lookalike to him, he just shrugs and says, “You mean Tony Stark? You _know_ I think he’s an egomaniacal jackass; what are you bringing him up to me for?” At lunch, nobody seems to notice how many people are sitting at the wrong house table, and Sherlock looks at Dean like he’s lost his mind when Dean tries to ask about the goddamn neon-green gorilla thumping its chest and pounding its place several seats down the Hufflepuff table (“Dean, _you helped_ Garfield develop at least half of his Animagus forms; you know full well that he gets a little slaphappy anytime he morphs”). No one bats an eye, either, when the two dudes from _The Vampire Diaries_ start macking on each other in the middle of dessert. “But _they’re_ brothers, too,” Dean groans, feeling unreasonably pissed that Pretty Boy and his bad actor of a brother get a free pass when he and Sam apparently don’t.

“What are you talking about? The Salvatores aren’t related,” says the burly, Eastern European-looking guy sitting at Dean’s other side and tugging on his own yellow tie to loosen it.

“They have the _same last name_.”

“Because they’re _married_. Isn’t it dreamy?”

“At age, what, like, sixteen? Not so much.”

Dumbass Muscle raises his eyebrows as he swings his legs over the bench seat. “Are you feeling okay today? Need a treatment or something?”

“A treatment?”

“I enjoy my treatments,” says Dumbass Muscle as he saunters toward a blonde Asian chick sitting at the Gryffindor table with someone who looks like Faith from _Buffy_ but actually answers to the name Caroline, or sometimes Echo (Dean isn’t totally sure what the story is there).

He tries bringing it up to Sammy after a disastrous sequence of afternoon Charms and Transfiguration lessons, thinking maybe finding out more about these “treatments” will point them to the source of the dimension or fantasy or whatever it is that they’re stuck in. However, Sam just laughs at him, his eyes sparkling even through the dim lighting of the broom cupboard. “By any chance, was this guy Romanian? Curly black hair? Goes by the name Victor or possibly Anthony?”

“Hot Asian girlfriend?”

Snapping his fingers, Sam informs him, “Dude, that’s _Dollhouse_. It’s a Joss Whedon show. I think it’s gonna be cancelled after this season, which is too bad; Season 2 has been really—”

“Hey, man, not relevant. Focus, c’mon.”

Sam clears his throat. “Right. Anyway, treatments are a thing they do on the show. I think it’s a dead end for our purposes.”

“ _Dammit_!” He winces at the flare of pain that comes when he kicks the closet door as hard as he can. It’s really got nothing on the shit Dean’s used to enduring, from hunting and now also from Hell, but it still does nothing to help relieve the frustration that’s been mounting all day.

“Dean, it’s okay. We’ll figure out another way out of this.” Sam sounds like he’s barely suppressing a laugh as he says it, pissing Dean off even further.

“Oh, like what? Do _you_ have any leads?”

“Well… no,” Sam admits, sighing, and Dean throws up an arm in a demonstrative gesture. “I spent most of the day being followed around by my new best friends, Arthur and Scorpius—”

“Who and who?”

“Prince Arthur from _BBC Merlin_ —total jackass, by the way—and Scorpius Malfoy, Draco Malfoy’s kid from the epilogue of the last _Harry Potter_ book. But here’s the weird thing: in _BBC Merlin_ , magic is heavily criminalized by Arthur and his father. Merlin has to perform it in secret, even whenever he’s using it to save Arthur’s ass.”

Distractedly, Dean interrupts, “What? That’s stupid. In _all_ the legends, Merlin was powerful enough that—”

“Yeah, well, in the BBC show, Merlin is actually Arthur’s servant.”

“Dude, what the hell are you watching in your downtime?”

“It’s subverting the…” Shaking his head, Sammy forces a strained smile. “You know what? Never mind. My point is, no way is Arthur’s character history compatible with being a student at a school for magic, but he doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. In fact, all I could get out of him about his personal life is that he wants to become Minister of Magic someday, has a stepsister named Morgana, is _dating_ Merlin—”

“So not his servant… unless that’s a kink they’re both into.”

“I wouldn’t actually be surprised, considering Arthur calls his dick ‘Excalibur.’”

“What the _fuck_ , Sam? How did that even come up in conversation between the two of you?” Dean splutters.

“He and Scorpius were comparing measurements,” says Sam grimly.

“Well, Arthur isn’t the only one with an unexpected boyfriend. Bella, the chick from _Twilight_ —she’s dating Jacob, the werewolf, _not_ her boyfriend Edward from the books. And the brothers from _The Vampire Diaries_? No longer brothers. Doll-boy says they’re _married_ , which is _bullshit_. There’s supposed to be a seven-year age difference between the two of them, but does Stefan look like a first year to you in this whack-job universe? What the hell are you laughing at, bitch?”

“Dude, you read the _Twilight_ books?”

Dean flushes red, obviously from anger, because the accusation is so offensive. “Shut up, _King Arthur_.”

“You watch _The Vampire Diaries_?”

“I said shut up!”

“Apparently you watched it religiously, if you’re so familiar with the ages and relationships of its characters.”

“I’m pissed that those douchebags get to commit incest all over the castle, and I can barely touch you in secret without Sherlock freakin’ Holmes telling me off for molesting you!”

At that, Sam’s smirk withers into something wearier—but at least he gets off the subject of Dean’s reading and viewing habits. “Dean, people accuse us of lying about being related _all_ the time, and that never seems to bother you. Hell, half the time, you play along.”

“I can deal with needing to be discreet, or people thinking we’re lying about being brothers. But I… this is obviously a fantasy world. There’s no moral lesson here. We are totally immersed in other people’s gay fantasies—incestuous fantasies—people who aren’t even real, but you and I _still_ can’t have this one thing, huh? It’s been a damn long time, and I…”

“I know, Dean,” Sam says.

But he _doesn’t_ know: Dean’s got over sixty years of lived experience under his belt, and most days, even just driving at the wheel of his baby with Sammy passed out beside him feels like something out of a distant dream. By the time Dean got out of Hell, he hardly could remember anything about his brother that the passage of time hadn’t warped, even mundane details like the high rasp of his voice, the way his girly hair constantly falls in his eyes. For Sammy, this morning was the first time they’d had sex in a couple years, but for Dean, it’s been more than half a lifetime.

He’s never stopped wanting more from his brother (of _anything_ Sam possibly could give Dean)—not really, not even when it was Dean who closed that door—but he’d genuinely believed, for decades, that he would never see Sammy again, only to come back to find this shell of Sam’s usual, vibrant self that lies, and carries out affairs with a _demon_ , and seems to live for the high that comes with exercising powers of demonic origins. To lose all confidence in the belief that they could ever find a way back to each other, and then have it happen—Sam’s got no idea what that’s like. He might _think_ he does—think it’s like Stanford all over again—but the tail end of Sam’s college career separated Dean from his brother for only two years, not freakin’ forty.

He clears his throat and scrutinizes Sam, who’s cast mostly in shadow where he’s crammed up against a shelf full of god knows what, probably broomstick handle polish or something equally ridiculous. “You said Malfoy’s kid is another third year?” Dean says once he’s stopped making a complete ass out of himself.

“Uh… yeah, yeah, he’s in my year. It’s _weird_ , because if the next gen kids are students already, then, like, half of these professors should be dead or retired by now. Sprout, Dumbledore, Lupin—”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think this place is operating within any established canonical timeline. Bella says the year is 2009.”

Scrunching up his forehead, Sammy says, “It’s definitely a fantasy world of some kind, looking at all the evidence. Why or how _we_ got pulled into it, though…”

“Not just that—whose fantasy is this, exactly? If we can find the person behind it, we can figure out what they did and how we can undo it.”

“Yeah—yeah, okay. Let’s start paying attention to see if we can find anybody who’s not based on a fictional character. We can check our common rooms tonight, and—”

“Uh, about that? The dorm room I woke up in this morning—I don’t think it was attached to the Hufflepuff common room,” Dean interjects.

“Really? I mean, are you sure? Yellow décor, near the kitchens in the basement…?”

“For starters, this place was at the top of a tower, and the living… room… was way too small to be a common room for an entire house. Plus, there were Gryffindor colors in there, too—and I had my own room: it’s got only one bed in it.”

“Oh my god.” The completely unidentifiable tone of Sam’s voice as the kid’s jaw drops worries Dean more than a little. “Dean, I think that’s the Heads’ dormitory.”

Dean frowns: he’d been expecting a more sinister revelation. “The what, now?”

“The Heads’ dorm. It’s a popular trope in _Harry Potter_ fanfiction: I’ve seen a lot of it in stories about Harry’s parents, who were Head Boy and Girl.”

“So what you’re saying is that you read Lily/James fanfiction?”

“You’re one to talk. Seen any _Vampire Diaries_ lately?” Dean scowls, while Sam furrows his eyebrows and adds, “Wait, how did you know that the Potters are named—”

“Heads’ dorm, huh? I wonder whose brilliant idea it was to give me that title.” Honestly, Dean had forgotten all about the badges he’d found in the dormitory that morning, and now, he fiddles with them where they’re affixed to the breast of his robes. “I guess that would be the same person as whoever is responsible for…”

When he trails off, Sammy clutches at his arm with bony teenage fingers and wide eyes. “Hey. Talk to me. What is it?”

His thrill of realization is moderately dampened by anger at the goddamn books interfering _again_ with their ability to live their lives uninterrupted, so soon after they discovered the stupid things in the first place. “Whoever did this must be a fan of Carver Edlund’s works, but when she tried to bring us here with all her favorite fictional characters…”

“She must not have realized that we’re real people, and she—what, sucked in the real versions of us by accident?”

“Like we’re in somebody else’s djinn dream. But djinns construct illusions, not alternate realities, so—witchcraft?”

Sam nods and rubs at his forehead, then looks up at him from underneath those stupid bangs Dean had forgotten that Sammy used to have. Smiling distantly, Dean pushes back the curly hairs to kiss off the anxious creases underneath them before leaning down further for a proper one. Sam’s sweating—lightly, but enough that Dean can taste salt and his palms grow wet once he settles them on Sam’s cheeks, locking his fingers into Sam’s damp hair. He takes a deep whiff of the faint stink and allows himself, for a second, to wonder—to entertain the thought that even when they get out of this castle and back to a world with the threats and demons and seductions that took Sammy away from him in the first place…

“So,” says Dean, and he turns his face away from Sam’s earnest one, “how am I supposed to find my way back to the Heads’ dormitory without knowing who the Head Girl is? She _should_ be able to show me up to it, right?”

“I know who the Head Girl is,” says Sam in a completely different tone of voice. “I’m surprised you don’t, since usually stories containing a Heads’ dorm set up the Head Boy and Girl to be dating each other. She didn’t come find you all day?”

“Who didn’t come find me?”

“Buffy Summers.”

“ _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ Buffy Summers?”

“That’s the one,” Sam grits out.

Snickering, Dean claps him on the shoulder. “You’re totally jealous that I’m dating a character you had a giant girl-crush on when you were fifteen, aren’t you?”

“I’m not jealous!” Sam protests, but his squeaky pubescent voice just makes Dean grin wider. “The puns the characters say on that show are really annoying, that’s all! And the lore is completely wrong—”

“Doesn’t seem to bother you about _BBC Merlin_ or _Harry_ freakin’ _Potter_ ,” Dean singsongs. Sam crosses his arms with a roll of his eyes.

Luckily, Buffy is still at the Gryffindor table when Dean and Sam go back to the Great Hall. She’s sitting between Xander and Willow, glancing between the two of them with a glazed look that honestly doesn’t surprise Dean at all, given how unengaged most of the characters here have seemed all day with—well, everything. He almost turns up the Winchester charm on her, but it’s not like Buffy is sentient enough to appreciate it or even necessarily respond much to it, and as much as Dean usually enjoys tormenting Sam with little jealous, teasing games—he doesn’t really feel like bothering now, like this, with Sammy still so likely to slip away from him again at the littlest provocation.

Instead, Dean lets a smile that’s as sleepy as he feels spill out across his lips, and he taps Buffy on the shoulder lightly, without lingering. “Hey, Buff. I don’t know about you, but I’m beat. Ready to head up?”

Out the corner of his eye, he watches Sam sidle over to the Slytherin table between two pipsqueaks Dean assumes are Scorpius and Arthur, while Buffy’s eyes spark with a little more life as she turns away from her friends to look at Dean. “Yeah? It’s not even seven yet.”

The only sleep Dean got before being thrust into his first day at Hogwarts School of fuckin’ Wizardry was a forty-minute afternoon catnap in the Impala, but he can’t exactly explain that to Buffy, so he offers, “I didn’t sleep great last night. I was stressed about… Quidditch.”

Now that he’s thinking about it, actually, yeah, Dean _is_ growing increasingly anxious about the prospect of _flying_ on a rickety broomstick, totally vulnerable to crash to the ground and die, in the vicinity of hostile Bludgers and equally hostile opposing Beaters. He wonders whether he’ll need to Houdini himself out of any practices or matches before he and Sammy find a way out of this mess.

Buffy just gives him an obviously insincere smile and says, “You shouldn’t be. Your team loves you, don’t they?”

She swings her legs over the bench seat after bidding Willow and Xander goodbye. Both of them react with absent smiles before resuming their discussion of… ways to kill vampires, apparently. How original. Dean’s curious how that would fly if the Salvatore vampires/brothers/husbands overheard them.

Based on Bella’s and Sherlock’s behavior earlier, Dean’s expecting Buffy to carry on about nothing of importance on the walk up to their tower, but Buffy stays mostly quiet, although she _does_ keep shooting him these weirdly wistful looks every now and again. Maybe he broke her programming or whatever by not playing along with the role of boyfriend.

When they get to the base of the tight spiral staircase leading to the entrance to their living room-common room thing, Dean puts an experimental hand on the small of Buffy’s back and nets himself an immediate, clear-eyed, genuine smile. God, these characters are as predictable as the monsters Dean hunts: simplistic to a T. It’s robotic, really, and unnerving.

Noting the password ( _Amortentia_ ) that gets them inside, Dean falters in front of the door to his own dormitory. Turning back to Buffy, he asks, “Wanna go down to breakfast together tomorrow?”

“I’d like that,” she says warmly. “Meet you at eight?”

“Cool,” he says with a relieved shrug: Dean’s not sure that he could still find his way there from this tower without getting hopelessly lost. “Well—have a good rest of your night, Buffy.”

He should probably be feeling more awkward about the whole interaction, but mercifully, he doesn’t. It’s like with monsters and spirits: the undercurrent of anxiety that otherwise characterizes all of Dean’s social interactions evaporates along with the necessity of any pressure to make a desirable impression. With creatures that function according to self-evident patterns, there’s no need any longer to obsess over what the thing really thinks or feels underneath the mollycoddling story it tells you. There’s no nuance: they wear all their stories on the outside.

Equally predictably, Dean proceeds to obsess over Sammy and his nuances and what he’s going to do when they get back home for a couple solid hours before he finally manages to fall asleep on the too-soft mattress in this too-quiet room. It’s like he can’t fall asleep at all anymore without a staticky TV, or a churning window AC unit, or shouting or sex noises from the next room over.

-

The next morning, Dean startles awake at the feeling of a small and unfamiliar hand shaking his shoulder. He gropes around for his gun or knife or _anything_ before remembering that the closest thing he’s got to a weapon in the shithole he’s stuck in is a sparking wooden stick that he can’t for the life of him get to work properly. The hand on his shoulder—currently recoiling as if burned—belongs to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who’s standing half a foot from Dean’s bedside and frowning dimly. God, Dean’s life is weird.

“Sorry,” he offers weakly. “You surprised me.”

“That’s okay. We overslept; I think breakfast must be over by now. What’s your first class today?”

He casts his mind back, trying to remember the timetable he consulted before hitting the sack last night. “History of Magic, I think.”

“I’ve got Potions, but I could still walk you there on my way down?”

At this point, Dean wouldn’t be at all averse to cutting the class entirely and sleeping an extra couple of hours instead, but he supposes he ought to make the effort to go to public places and pay attention to who’s there—who doesn’t fit with the rest of the cast of characters. He groans. Of course he overslept: there are no fuckin’ electronics anywhere in the castle, let alone a functional alarm clock he could have set the night before. How did Harry and co. supposedly do this for seven years? How did _anybody_ get where they needed to go on time before the advent of electronic alarms?

He’s half-expecting the majority of the History of Magic class to be wandering into the room throughout the second half of the period just like Dean does, but when Buffy drops him off with a blush and a peck on the lips, the classroom is full except for him. Nobody seems to find his tardiness remotely interesting, besides the ghost (Binns?) teaching the class, who says in the middle of an unrelated thought, easy as you please, “Hand in your essay and take a seat, Mr. Westin.”

“I, um, I don’t have any essay…” Dean tries to say, but Binns ignores him and just carries on with his lecture, which seems to involve reading directly off of a textbook page that contains nothing but the words to some weird-ass poem called “Granger Danger.” Yeah… okay.

Grabbing the only available seat—up front by where the ghost is droning, unfortunately—he opens his bookbag and then nearly drops it again when he finds a thick scroll labeled _BINNS’S HOMEWORK_ in his own block print. When Dean tugs it free and unfurls it, he finds himself staring at an essay on something to do with goblins, in his own handwriting, that he himself definitely did not write. Shrugging, he chooses not to question it and walks back over to set it next to the pyramid of similar scrolls that’s collapsing on the desk next to Binns.

The same thing happens next period in Defense Against the Dark Arts, where Dean discovers and submits an essay in his own penmanship about something called the Riddikulus Charm. However, it seems that Dean’s academia-oriented good luck stops there. As soon as Professor Lupin starts blathering about boggarts and how to defeat them and how he’s got one _right_ now in that wardrobe that’s going to take the shape of the worst fears of everyone present, Dean can feel himself starting to sweat. Boggarts can’t simulate an experience like flying, can they? Will it just turn into a little model airplane for Dean? Or will it become something more sinister, like Alastair and his rack, or Dean himself in Alastair’s place, smirking as he relishes the chance to dish out some of what he’d survived—?

Lupin himself demonstrates first, lazily waving away the glowing silver sphere that appears; it next becomes somebody’s boyfriend dying—somebody else’s boyfriend breaking up with the kid in question—and then it’s Dean’s turn. He half-turns on his heels to make for the door, but he draws up his chin almost magnetically when he hears the telltale _crack_ and sees—Sammy.

It’s Sam as an adult again, smiling, and primal, instinctual relief washes over Dean for a moment at his renewed proximity to his brother—until first Sam’s face twists, in pain, and then his back twists, too, red blooming up into the flannel from a wound at the base of his spine that never could have healed by natural means—and when Sam spins back around, his face is contorted in a sneer, and his eyes are black all the way through, and Dean can _hear_ their dad’s voice echoing in his head, or maybe in the room, telling him that Dean should have killed his Sammy when he had the chance—

He fumbles in his robe pocket for his wand, stumbling backward, tripping and collapsing in a heap, and when Sam screws his eyes shut and raises one hand, clenching his fingers and rotating his wrist, the black smoke that hurtles toward Sam is—it almost looks like it’s coming from Dean’s—

“ _Riddikulus_!” says a hoarse voice from somewhere impossibly distant, and then Sam’s body snaps into another hazy full moon that Lupin waves off into the silence.

Somebody that Dean thinks is supposed to be John Watson extends a hand to help Dean back up to his feet. “Damn, Dean,” he says, smiling. “That’s some pretty dark childhood trauma you’re carrying around there.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Dean mutters, but if John hears him, he doesn’t react to the words.

“Hey, Dean, it’s cool with you and Buffy if I invite Sherlock to the party tonight, right?”

“Huh?”

“You know, the one you two are throwing in the Heads’ dorm after dinner. Buffy asked me to bring the Firewhiskey?”

“Yes, definitely bring that,” says Dean distractedly.

He can hardly stand to wait out the rest of class, but he’s stuck, without any knowledge of how to find Sammy again from here. Finally, the bell rings, and he trails John from the classroom to the Great Hall, where he scarfs down something gross and French-sounding and dodges the excitably flailing paws of the green-ass bobcat-thing he assumes is Garfield (or whatever his name was) before he manhandles Sam away from the Slytherin table, intent on initiating a second round of life-affirming sex.

However, Sam categorically refuses to follow Dean into their broom cupboard and drags him instead to the Hogwarts library, the location of which Sammy has of _course_ already memorized. Perhaps contrary to his intention, every person in the place seems to be much too occupied learning their partner’s mouth and hands to do any legitimate studying—the librarian included. “Pince and Pomfrey, seriously?” Sam hisses under his breath as he throws his bag down on the nearest table and flings himself into a chair. “And what’s with the caveman act, Dean?”

“With the libido of thirteen-year-old _you_ , I’m surprised you’re _not_ in the mood.”

“We’re working a case. We can mess around later, for god’s sake.”

“Really? Can we?”

He knows instantly that he’s given away too much, and sure enough, Sam turns a scrutinizing eye onto him. “You know, I’ve missed _you_ , too, the last couple years. What’s this about?”

Squaring his shoulders, Dean takes the seat opposite Sammy at the table with stiff movements. “We did boggarts with Lupin today.”

Sam’s eyebrows knit together into an annoyingly knowing frown. “So did we. Yesterday.”

“What’d you see?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Sam admits, “You, in flames, on the ceiling. I know he’s dead—I know it’s not rational.”

“Sammy…”

“Why? What did _you_ see?”

Dean looks away, and Sam sighs. “But hey,” Dean offers once his heartbeat has return to a facsimile of normality, “apparently, I’m throwing a party with Buffy tonight in our dorm. Huh? Wanna come? Help me scope it out for intel? It seems like the kind of thing somebody who created a fantasy world would score herself an invite to.”

“What, so I can watch _Buffy_ kiss up to you and drool all over you for my entire evening?”

“Come on, Sam. I want you to be there.”

Huffing in protest, Sam picks at one sleeve of his robes while averting Dean’s eyes. “You know, it seems like sloppy world-building that the third years and the seventh years are covering the same curriculum in at least one subject,” he says finally. “You’d think somebody building a Hogwarts fantasy for themselves would make the magic more interesting. Self-completing homework, easy spells—”

“Who says the spells are easy? You haven’t gotten any of them to work, have you?”

“You _haven’t_?” Looking up, Sam’s teasing smile falters and then dies away when he sees whatever expression Dean is apparently wearing. “I know you haven’t read the books, but whatever this is, it’s a lot less complicated than the construct J.K. Rowling created in them. The spells are rudimentary, and the math doesn’t add up at _all_ with class schedules or student-to-teacher ratios. If a trickster god were the one behind this, the setting would be a lot more intricate.”

“If you say so, man. Thought I was done with this world when I took my last GED exam. School was shitty enough the first time around; who goes back to torture themselves for kicks?”

“College students. Grad students. Teachers—”

“Whatever, college boy.”

He’s got free periods for the rest of the day, so while Sam pads back over to the Great Hall to find someone to follow to his Arithmancy class, Dean takes all of ten minutes to realize the library books are all full of the text of the _Harry Potter_ series before he ditches the joint. He doubts that interrupting any of the lip-lockers would net him much useful information, instead opting to spend the hours until dinner getting lost looking in turns for the kitchen, the Heads’ dorm, and a way out of the castle and onto the grounds. By the time he stumbles back across the Great Hall and its stupidly sunny ceiling, dinner is nearly over, a few stragglers chatting or clearing their plates with not a serving platter in sight for Dean to raid.

“For a crappy fictional construct, this place has a floor plan that’s unnecessarily complicated,” Dean says under his breath as Buffy stands and walks toward him. Sam, predictably, is nowhere to be found—probably practicing his “rudimentary” little magic tricks in the Slytherin common room with _Arthur_ and _Scorpius_. He turns to Buffy and says dully, “Hello, girlfriend. I hear I’m throwing a party with you tonight.”

“Better hurry, or we’ll be the last ones there,” she says.

“Fashionably late. I’m ready to go if you are. Hope there’s food; I’m starving.”

“Arthur and Merlin should be bringing food from the kitchens.”

Dean rolls his eyes but otherwise follows Buffy without complaint up to the Heads’ dormitory, paying close attention this time to the route they take to get there. He _hopes_ he and Sam will be back where they belong within the next couple of days, tops, but realistically speaking, it might be a while before they get themselves unstuck. They’ve got no leads, not even an idea of where to look for leads, as loathe as Dean is to admit that he might be trapped in Wacko Hogwarts with no immediately apparent escape hatch.

And yet—he and Sam have been closer since finding themselves here than they’d been in decades (for Dean, anyway). He still can’t pinpoint exactly _what_ about his brother has seemed off since Dean woke up topside, besides the time Sammy has been spending with that bitch Ruby that he somehow _still_ thinks Dean doesn’t know about, and then there are the memories of Hell that Sam keeps pestering him to talk more about—but there’s something about Dean’s little brother that’s clicking back into place the longer they’re stuck at Hogwarts, something taut and frigid that Dean is nervous to see return when they get themselves back to the real world.

He shakes it off as he and Buffy mount the staircase leading to the Heads’ dorm, cringing a little when they say their _Amortentia_ s and the door swings forward to reveal a few dozen people, at least, all crammed into their little sitting area. Dean’s first thought is that this many people in this small a space has _got_ to be against fire safety guidelines. His second, after he pushes aside the first with an even mix of surprise and self-consciousness, is the familiar flood of comfort that comes when he catches sight of his brother.

Sam’s eyes flit up to meet his a few seconds later, after Dean walks right up to where Sammy is setting up some kind of pathetic snack buffet on the coffee table. For god’s sake, there isn’t even any pie. “Hey, man,” Sam says haggardly. “This is, uh, Scorpius and Albus—” he jerks his head toward two boys nearby who appear to be trying their damndest to have sex with each other through their clothes “—and that’s Arthur and Merlin—” he indicates the similarly occupied couple grinding on each other next to the first pair. Dean snorts a laugh and suddenly feels a whole lot less anxious about Sam’s potential friendship prospects.

Of course, the two enthusiastic gay couples are far from the only ones in the room: Dean and Sam are surrounded mostly by pairs of overeager teenage boys. He does, however, spot one small gaggle of kids Buffy seems to have joined who are chatting lightly about—“Oh, you gotta be kidding me. _Again_?” Dean grumbles.

“What?” says Sam, and Dean nods to where the group has congregated at the base of the steps that lead to Buffy’s room. The _Vampire Diaries_ brothers—oh, apologies, _husbands_ —are sitting together on one of the bottom steps, Damon’s arm slung over Stefan’s shoulders, while the dude standing close to Bella from _Twilight_ (Dean dimly recognizes him as Jacob the werewolf) tells the group, “I think the only way to kill a vampire for sure is with fire. You have to rip them to pieces and then burn them.”

“I’ve seen it for myself,” confirms Edward Cullen, tugging on his Slytherin tie and nodding seriously.

“Fire is one way to kill us,” says one of Buffy’s pals, a dude—Angelo or something? (It’s been a _long_ time since Dean used to watch _Buffy_ at Bobby’s house with his teenage brother.) “But so is a stake to the heart, or beheading, or sunlight.”

“No, we sparkle in the sun.”

“Oh, fuck you, Sparkles,” Dean mutters, prompting a snort from Sam.

“It’s definitely lethal, but that’s what our daylight rings are for,” Damon informs them.

“The Scooby gang were having the same conversation in the Great Hall earlier,” Dean tells Sam, ripping his gaze away from them to cast his eyes around the room. He makes a note of the few people he doesn’t recognize—they could be from books without film adaptations, or more Next Gen kids from _HP_ , but he’ll try and verify their identities with Sam anyway—and he rolls his eyes when he sights no fewer than four young Robert Downey, Jrs., in various stages of adolescence grouped together with several other students underneath one of the Hufflepuff banners along the far wall. Dean recognizes Sherlock and Tony Stark among the Downeys, paired off with Jude Law and Edward Norton, respectively. “I think our witch is a fan of _somebody_ ’s career,” he says, pointing.

Sammy snickers for a moment, then asks, “Hey, what’s with the _Sherlock Holmes_ cast? That movie’s not supposed to come out until Christmas.”

“Maybe she’s just excited for it to be released. Or maybe she’s already read some of the ACD books.”

“You know, it’s kind of strange when you think about it. A spell like this must have taken a long time to construct, even to get it up to just the level of detail it has here—but it’s like she didn’t have the foresight to realize how many stories she’s going to miss out on, or that she didn’t bring with her, for the time she’s planning on staying here. Have you seen the library? Every book in there contains text from the _Harry Potter_ series—nothing else. Shouldn’t it get boring?”

“Well, she probably thought it’d be even better to meet all these characters for real than to bring the stories along. I mean, she must’ve been feeling pretty messed up back at home to spend weeks working on this while knowing what she was trading in to get it.”

Frowning, Sam says, “You talk like you know for sure that she wanted to stay here permanently.”

“Look around. Do you build a castle this detailed and craft hundreds of personas just for a weekend vacation?”

“Maybe not _just_ for that, but to have it on hand to visit whenever you want? Don’t you ever just wish you could step back from the life when it starts to get overwhelming?”

“Oh, you mean like you did for four years when you skipped off to college?”

Sam sets his jaw, stepping back a fraction from Dean. “Unbelievable. You’re never going to move past it, are you?”

“Sammy—”

“No,” he says tightly, and then adds, to himself more than to Dean, “I need a drink.”

“I’m sorry, Sam, all right? We’re past it. You happy now?”

“No!” Sam says again, raising his voice now, as he uncorks one of the bottles of Firewhiskey that he’s got arranged so neatly on the coffee table. “You know, for someone who prides himself on his masculinity, you can be really passive-aggressive. You’re worse than even Jess was. You would have been proud of me if Dad hadn’t brainwashed you—”

“Watch who _you’re_ calling brainwashed, skulking off like a little bitch every week with that demon skank—”

“Stop deflecting! God, you’re so predictable. I made myself into this—this _monster_ for _you_ , Dean, because you were gone and I had to do… _something_.” Sam’s forehead is lined in frustration when he takes a long pull off the Firewhiskey, but when he slams the bottle back down on the table, he doesn’t so much as cough. “Dammit! Is this _root beer_ —is that all this shit is?”

“I happen to like root beer,” comes a soft voice from behind them, and Dean glances over his shoulder to find Buffy standing a few paces back, her ordinarily-empty features contorted into something weirdly amused.

Rolling his eyes, Dean fires out, “You know, that’s great, Buffybot, but my brother and I here are in the middle of something, so if you could just—”

“‘Buffybot.’ I get it,” she says shakily, and Dean stops cold, turns his whole body properly around to watch the way her eyebrows narrow and her knees clack together. “It would be clever if I were a mindless NPC like everybody else I put here. The pop-culture references were one of the things I liked about you in the books—but I didn’t code arguing with Sam into your infrastructure, which means either I messed up the spell or _you_ are not Sam and Dean from _Supernatural_.”

Reeling, his pulse thrumming at double speed, Dean splutters, “But you’re not— _Buffy_ isn’t a real thing—”

“Because you’re not Buffy Summers, are you?” Sam interrupts. He seems to have mostly forgotten his anger at Dean, for which Dean is thankful.

The imposter tucks her chin to her neck and breaks eye contact for a moment. “No. I’m not,” she confirms, and Dean begins to realize that her stilted speech might be a sign not of vapidity but of shyness. Dammit—how did he misread her so badly? “But there would have been nobody here to tell the difference if you two hadn’t hijacked my simulation. Who are you?”

“Sam Winchester, and this is my br—”

“Last names weren’t in the books. I gave them the name Werner for the spell.”

Pivoting to face his brother, Dean says in an undertone, “This isn’t gonna go quick, is it?”

Sam smiles thinly. “Do you want to give her the speech, or should I?”

“Look, I may be into fandom, but I’m not stupid,” the fake Buffy interjects. “Not everybody is as gullible as samlicker81.”

“Excuse me? Sam _licker_ …?”

“samlicker81? Webmistress of that gross slash site MoreThanBrothers.net?”

“Yeah, about that,” Dean tells her, “why is it okay that Damon and Stefan are screwing each other, but not me and Sammy?”

“Wait, what?”

“Way to be discreet, Dean,” says Sam with an anxious laugh.

“Look,” Dean says, facing the girl again; her jaw is hanging comically slack as her eyes dart back and forth between the brothers. “All the crap Chuck wrote about—I mean, Carver Edlund wrote about in the _Supernatural_ books—monsters, demons, hunters, all nine yards—it’s real.”

“Well, _yeah_ ,” she replies, and Dean clamps his mouth shut and frowns. “His framework for magic is obviously real; I’ve been practicing it since _years_ before the first book was released. I figured Edlund was a witch and was incorporating real supernatural phenomena and spells into his writing.”

“Well, he’s not a witch: he’s a prophet. He’s been tuning into our lives and writing books about them.”

“What? But that’s so invasive.”

“You’re telling me,” Dean says darkly.

“He thought his visions were just dreams at first,” Sam informs her with his face all bunched up in ill-deserved sympathy. “We only found out about the books and got in contact with him—what, a couple of weeks ago?”

“I thought they were supposed to be obscure, like cult classics or something,” Dean grumbles, “and now we pick up a second stalker in one month?”

“Hey, that’s not… I didn’t know you were _real_. You were supposed to be alt-dimensional manifestations of fictional constructs like everyone else here is. I never would have pulled anyone in with me and away from their lives on purpose.”

Rounding his eyes, Sam implores, “But now that we’re here, you can get us back out, right? There’s… we’re trying to stop the Apocalypse, and—”

“No, no, I get it. You don’t have to explain. I worked a trigger into the castle that’s linked to the hex bags I used to cast the spell from our home dimension: fire the trigger, destroy the hex bags. I wouldn’t mind the chance to rework some of the details before going back in—and writing you both out the second time, of course.”

“Great—so where’s this trigger?”

Dean’s stomach drops when the witch smiles wryly. “I didn’t want any NPCs to stumble across it by accident, and I didn’t even plan on ever using it myself, so it won’t be… straightforward.”

“What is it?” Sammy asks, adding after a pause, “And is there something we can call you besides Buffy?”

She only hesitates for a second or two before her shoulders tense up and she answers, “I’m Dominique. And the trigger is killing the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets.”

Of fucking _course_ it couldn’t be as simple as burning a hex bag. Dean rolls his eyes and groans.

-

“You designed the blueprint for a seven-story castle, complete with a functioning Marauder’s Map, and you worked out the physiology of two dozen man-to-animal transformations—but you couldn’t memorize _one_ word of Parseltongue to get us into the Chamber,” Dean says under his breath as Dominique leads the way down the hallway toward Dumbledore’s office on the third floor. Sam shoots him a dirty look, but Dominique doesn’t seem to notice the jibe: she’s got her hands full, literally, with a kelly-green crow that’s hooting with delight and attempting to fly free, flapping in a wide circle above where Dominique’s reining him in with two hands clinging to his spindly little crow feet.

“Be grateful that she did, so that we can use Beast Boy’s snake physique to get past the bathroom,” Sammy chides, though there’s a hint of a snicker in his voice. Frankly, Dean thinks that Sam laughed at him for _far_ longer than necessary before informing him that Garfield Logan is the birth name of the superhero Beast Boy, who can transform into animals at will and apparently co-starred in some of Sam’s favorite childhood comics.

Now that the initial shock has mostly worn off, Dean’s still pissed they need to kill a frickin’ basilisk tonight at all—who _does_ shit like this? Why should Dominique get to skip out on her responsibilities and make him and Sam jump through all these ridiculous hoops?—but he keeps the bitching to a minimum, still stuck on what Sam said about Dean being a passive-aggressive girl or some such nonsense. At least it doesn’t seem like ganking the basilisk is going to take very long, the way things are going: Dominique’s map thingimajig made it easy to locate Beast Boy in the Hufflepuff common room, and Dean doesn’t expect Dumbledore to put up much of a fight when they collect the sword of Gryffindor from his office.

Sam keeps trying to make small talk with the witch, complimenting the castle’s architecture and asking how she became a fan of magic and of Robert Downey, Jr. At first, Dominique circumvents all his efforts with clipped sentences and downcast eyes, her behavior pretty much the same as it was when they were calling her Buffy—except now Dean is paying attention to the subtle signs of mixed intellect and nervousness that weren’t registering before: deliberate avoidance of eye contact, twisting of her hand and lips. Across the full half-hour it takes them to make their way from the Heads’ dormitories toward the Headmaster’s office, however, Dominique seems to warm up to Sam when his enthusiasm about her spellwork doesn’t flag: she answers his questions with longer, more animated replies, her free hand flying demonstratively in front of her.

“Cockroach Cluster,” Dominique suddenly interrupts Sam mid-sentence, and Dean gapes at her for a second before realizing that she’s just spoken the password to enter the office.

The stone gargoyle crouched in front of her leaps to the side to reveal a winding staircase that the four of them begin to ascend, Beast Boy still flapping strong against Dominique’s grip. “Are you sure that Bird Brain here is gonna cooperate when we need him to perform?” Dean asks, raising his voice this time so Dominique will be sure to hear.

“What? Oh, he’s fine; he’s just excitable—he seems to get a little loopy whenever he transforms. I think he might not be simulated at full cognitive capacity in animal forms, but he shouldn’t be in any distress or resist instructions or anything,” she huffs, apparently somehow halfway to winded just from mounting the steps to the door. She frees one of her hands to push it open with a creak, and Dean’s eyes scan the assorted trinkets covering the surfaces and walls, skating over the form of Professor Dumbledore, who inquires, “Would you care for a lemon drop?”

“We’re good, thanks. If I remember correctly… it should be right…” Dominique grunts as she hefts a weighty silver sword from off the wall behind the Headmaster’s desk. The pointed end scrapes across the ground with the way she dangles the ruby-encrusted handle limply at her side. “We’ll just be borrowing this for a while, Professor,” she says carelessly.

“Why, of course,” says Dumbledore with a bright smile. “Can I perhaps tempt you with a lemon drop?”

“Seriously?” Dean mutters.

Beast Boy squawks and flaps harder against Dominique’s grip. Sam rushes forward to meet her in the center of the office, brushing his stupid mop of hair out of his eyes. “Let us take—well—at least one of these off your hands.” With a hysterical-sounding giggle, Dominique transfers Beast Boy’s spindly little crow legs from her hand to Sam’s and then adjusts her hold on the sword of Gryffindor.

As Dean trails behind her, Dominique leads them down from the tower and across the castle toward the bathroom entrance to the Chamber, animatedly sharing with Sam the mechanics of her world-building spellwork. “How did you handle book characters?” Sammy’s asking now, ducking to avoid Beast Boy’s wings. “I mean, how specific of three-dimensional images did you include for them? Because Dean and I can’t have looked in your designs the same as we do in real life—when you met us, wouldn’t you have thought…?”

“I fed the spell cover art from the _Supernatural_ books, but you’re both drawn as adults in those. I thought something might have gone wrong with the de-ageing code I added. It’s an obscure enough fandom that I couldn’t find any fan art that would have worked, and I couldn’t have tried to draw you as teenagers myself: I can’t really draw at all.”

Rolling his eyes, Dean mutters, “Can’t really accurately mimic human psychology, either, but that didn’t stop you from trying.”

Sam twists his head to give Dean a pointed look over his shoulder. “Knock it off, Dean. That’s enough.”

“No, I won’t ‘knock it off’—this is bullshit!” He stops walking, and Sammy and the girl follow suit, somewhere along a tight, winding hallway on the second floor of the castle. The narrow and curved walls, high ceiling, and total lack of windows are giving Dean the impression of being even more trapped than he already is. “Hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but you’re not special. Hiding from your problems in some spell that lets you pretend to be _Buffy Summers, Head Girl_ , doesn’t make you anything but a coward and a fake.”

“Dean—”

He ignores his brother and rounds on Dominique, who shrinks comically behind the sword hefted in front of her. “Take it from someone who’s had a goddamn book series written about their life. You can frame _anything_ like an appealing story, with a hero and adventure and a nice little lesson at the end, but there ain’t no such thing as adventure. There’s just misery and blame and taking some goddamn responsibility for your actions. Our lives are _miserable_ , but we wake up every day and do our jobs—we save people, and we hunt things—because that’s the gig, and there ain’t nothing— _nothing_ —that makes _you_ so special that you don’t have to deal with your own shit.”

“I said that’s _enough_!” Sammy snaps. Turning to Dominique, he claps a hand on her shoulder and adds, “Don’t listen to him: all he’s doing is talking about his own insecurities.”

“And that’s the other thing,” Dean blazes. Dominique’s head whips from Sam back to face him again with wide eyes. “Who the fuck are you that your little problems are _so_ bad you can’t stand to face them out in the real world? Let me guess: little white suburban nerd girl, about fifteen years old, never had to wonder where your next meal’s coming from or worry about anything except boys and—and your makeup and how popular you are up at your stupid little high school?”

Dean can feel Dominique actually shaking from where he’s got her pressed up against the curved wall (and when did that happen?), but to her credit, she just bites her lip and doesn’t break eye contact. “Yeah, so you’ve got a few things wrong,” she says in a quiet but steady voice. “I’m twenty-three. The nine bucks an hour I make doesn’t cover much except ramen noodles and my student loan payments, and it’s definitely not enough to pay for hormone replacement therapy or bottom surgery. This whole thing started because I thought I could just—be in a body that feels like it fits, for once, even if it isn’t real.”

“Wait a minute,” Sam stammers, “hormone…? Does—you’re a transvestite?”

Dean barks out a laugh. “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘transgender,’ college boy. Wow. Honestly, what were they teaching you people at Stanford? Isn’t California supposed to be progressive?”

“Wha—I’m a Republican.”

“That actually explains a _lot_ ,” Dean snorts. Talking over Sam’s indignant crowing (and Beast Boy’s literal crowing), he looks back at Dominique, who seems to have exhausted her ability to form coherent sentences aloud for the moment and is simply smacking her lips at him like a fish. “You thought wearing Sarah Michelle Gellar’s meatsuit would get rid of your dysphoria?”

“What’s dysphoria?” Sam asks.

Dominique ignores him, seemingly having found her words again. “ _Buffy_ was my favorite show in high school. I always wanted to be like her.”

“And the gay couples everywhere?”

“I was a part of the gay community for a long time before I came out as trans. It would be like erasing that part of myself not to give it representation here.”

Dean tilts his head, assessing. Social interaction may make him feel anxious, but it’s largely because of that very anxiety that he’s developed a knack for reading people—for figuring out the rules by which they operate and then exploiting them—because he’s _had_ to, because he couldn’t have survived as a hunter or as a Winchester without an understanding of people’s playbooks. He’s spent most of his life working people, from Dad to the dozen witnesses he questions on every hunt to the souls Alastair handed him in Hell. The ability to take the mystery out of people is what keeps Dean’s jitters from becoming debilitating, but they’re all crawling their way back up his spine and bubbling into his throat now as he replays every interaction he’s had in the last two days with the girl who’s wearing Buffy Summers’s face, evaluating just how badly his judgment failed him.

Before, the thing Dean was hung up on was how he didn’t suspect anything to indicate that Buffy wasn’t like the other characters here. He’s _still_ hung up on it, to be honest, but he’s starting to think that it may have distracted him from gauging Dominique accurately even after she’d revealed her identity to them.

All he wants to do is to get Sam alone and compare analyses—take comfort the way he only ever does in the company of the person he understands best—but Dean and Sam _don’t_ really know each other anymore, not with Alastair and Ruby and the things they’ve both done getting in the way. He casts a sideways look at Sammy, who still looks woefully confused by the disruption of his precious gender binary. “Look, you get us out of here, and I’ll teach you how to hustle pool and hack so you can afford to buy hormones online, all right? You just gotta promise me one thing.”

Dominique hums, frowning.

“Don’t waste your whole life in here,” says Dean, gesturing around at them with his arms spread as far as they can in the narrow hall. “You poke at the spell in your free time, pop in to visit and check out your improvements—yeah, fine, but you always gotta find your way back out, okay, kid?”

Her mouth twists. “I’m not a kid. I told you, I’m—”

“You’re twenty-three, yeah, I know. You’re practically a geriatric. Come on, let’s go slay that basilisk.”

It takes a little coercing to get Beast Boy to transition from crow to human to snake, but otherwise, they make their way into Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom. While Dominique is coaching Beast Boy through the entrance, Sam pulls Dean aside by the elbow and mutters, “How do _you_ know all this stuff about transvestites, anyway?” but Dean shushes him with only a quick reprove of, “Trans _gender_ , Sammy, honestly.” Dean’s first exposure to the trans community had been on a case he’d worked solo back in ’03 or ’04, and, well—it’s best if they don’t tell each other anything they got up to when Sam was at Stanford.

In all fairness to Dominique, the pseudo-Chamber of Secrets looks pretty much exactly like what Dean remembers from the second _Harry Potter_ movie, right down to the ornate stone statue of Salazar Slytherin along the far wall. Even though the basilisk doesn’t put up much of a fight, Sam insists on killing the thing himself—Dean suspects more out of some nerdy impulse than any actual concern for Dominique’s safety or competency. The two of them hang back and watch as Sam parries and dodges near the thing’s massive head with way too happy of a grin on his face.

“Sorry about him,” says Dean, nodding toward his brother. “He means well, but he can be a self-absorbed, closed-minded bastard sometimes.”

Dominique presses her lips together, letting them curve up at the corners, and says nothing on the subject, for which Dean is grateful. “You know,” she tells Dean instead, “building this simulation wouldn’t have been any less valid if I _were_ a—what did you think I was? A spoiled teenage…?”

“Fifteen-year-old white suburban girl,” Dean mumbles with a discomfited little chuckle, looking pointedly away and at Sammy.

She laughs, resting the side of her head against his shoulder. “The thing is, I have friends from fandom who are upper-middle-class high school girls, and they’re just… the thing about fandom is that there’s room for everybody in it. Even them. Even me. Fic archives are the reason I wasn’t lonely when _I_ was in high school, and I’m not ashamed that the thought of becoming a part of those stories is where I—well, and I mean, it’s a hell of a lot less embarrassing than if I were going around publishing self-insert fanfics all over the Internet.”

Dean sniggers. “What, did you put in your spell all the tropes you wouldn’t dare to publish in your writing online?”

“I read enough of them as a kid that they make me feel at home. I’m not gonna spam the Internet with the ones I know are shitty, but there’s no harm indulging in them in here, where it’s just me.”

“Just as long as you don’t spend _all_ your time here,” he implores.

Dominique shrugs the shoulder that’s not pressed up against Dean’s side. “So, uh, firing the trigger will spit us all back out to exactly where we were when we went in, just a few seconds later. I’ll rewire it so you don’t get dragged back in the next time I come back.”

“But that won’t be anywhere near you,” Dean says slowly. “How am I supposed to find you to help get you set up with hormones? Do you have a phone number or—or email, or… a legal name we can look you up by, even?”

She just keeps smiling that tight-lipped smile. “I appreciate the offer. I do. But I don’t agree with your methods, and—I don’t want you to see me the way I am out there. You don’t have social anxiety, Dean—you don’t know what it does to a person. The only way I’m able to string two sentences together in here is because this still feels too surreal to actually be happening, and if this were actually happening…”

He can’t help but choke out a laugh, and when she shoots him a confused look, he starts to explain, “Acting like a cocky son of a bitch all the time doesn’t mean that I—”

With a resounding _crack_ , the Chamber and everything in it slam into blackness all around him, and an instant later, he finds himself slouched in the passenger seat of his baby with a crick in his neck and his feet stretched as far as they can go into the footwell in front of him. “Shit! SAMMY!” he bellows, opening his eyes to find the car veering off onto the shoulder of the road at high speed on the mercifully deserted stretch of I-80 they’re traversing.

“I know, I got it— _dammit_!” says Sam. Dean can hear his right foot fumbling for the brake as Sammy squeezes the steering wheel and pulls the Impala to a jerky stop on the side of the road. Sam’s breathing hard, wild-eyed, as he fishes a goddamn flask out of his jacket and takes a short pull of the stuff.

Dean snorts a little. “Seriously? _You_ , day drinking? Nerd girl’s Hogwarts gave you _that_ much of a shock?”

“Shut up. I thought… when we were there, I didn’t need—and I thought I might not…” Dean raises an eyebrow, but Sam doesn’t get any less cryptic, just shakes his head and takes another sip from the flask again before stashing it back in his pocket.

“So, uh, it’s later,” Dean hedges as Sam wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and puts the car back in gear.

Sam doesn’t look over. “What’s later?”

“No, I mean… it’s later. Hunt’s over. You said when we were done—I thought we could…?”

But Sam just flips on his blinker and merges back onto the road, looking pointedly (it seems to Dean) out the windshield instead of over at his brother. “It’s probably about time we found another case, don’t you think?”

“We—um, we _just_ wrapped one up, Sam.”

“I’m thinking a run-of-the-mill salt-and-burn would feel great right about now. First Chuck Shurley, now this—I’ve had enough of the _Supernatural_ fandom to last a lifetime, haven’t you? Time for something normal from our lives for a change.”

Dean’s not going to say something girly like that being anywhere with Sam is his normal. He’s _not_. But he figures, as he stares glumly out the window and readjusts his slouch against the bench, that when you take out the Chucks of the world, maybe not _everything_ from fandom is all bad.


End file.
